As Obama energy secretary fears warming will end Cal farms, realists analyze what needs to be done

Two interesting developments on the energy and climate change front today:

Steven Chu

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, in his first interview since his confirmation, comes out swinging on the climate change issue, telling the LA Times’ Jim Tankersly he fears climate change could wipe out agriculture in his home state of California. Hard to imagine, yes — will we be growing winter tomatoes and bell peppers up here in the Skagit Valley? The interview does show that Chu, at least, intends to keep ringing the bell on the climate issue. He said:

I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. … I’m hoping that the American people will wake up.

All Things Considered has a long-needed piece about what really needs to be done to avert climate disaster — and it’s not a pretty picture. Fool around with the numbers and you’ll see that even with the G-8, China, India, Mexico and South America all hitting a 5 percent-a-year reduction target for greenhouse gases — which would be very, very hard — we still will go over the 400 ppm carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere that climate scientists say we must avoid. (And recall that one of the first guys who started warning about this, Jim Hansen, actually believes we must reduce it to 350 ppm.)

ATC’s Richard Harris also introduces us to a guy who sounds like he was paying attention in political science class, one Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University. He says the only way out of this, politically, is lots and lots and lots of technological innovation that will allow us to avoid the living-in-caves scenario that’s always trotted out by global-warming skeptics:

Politically, what you’re asking people to do is to pay a huge upfront cost for benefits many decades down the road that they can’t even anticipate or predict. And that is politically an extremely difficult sort of situation to manage.

So, it looks like Dateline Earth’s never-ending search for the 100 one percent solutions to global warming must trudge on.